New kids in town

HCN's newest interns, Wyatt Orme and Sarah Tory, started their tenure off right with a hike up western Colorado's East Beckwith Mountain.

Krista Langlois

Well, they're not exactly kids, but HCN is pleased to welcome two new interns to our Paonia, Colorado, office for six months of journalism boot camp. And we're also delighted that Krista Langlois, our extraordinary editorial fellow, is staying for another six months.

Growing up in Toronto, new editorial intern Sarah Tory devoured books on mountaineering, learned to ski on the modest yet icy slopes several hours away and became an avid rock climber and runner. The summers after her high school graduation in New Hampshire and freshman year at Williams College in Massachusetts, she returned to the Canadian Rockies, where she cleaned cabins at a lodge – and encountered grizzly bears.

Sarah, who recently completed her MFA from Columbia University in New York, has covered environmental issues for the English-language Santiago Times in Chile and worked on a documentary about mining in Peru. She and a friend once biked 5,000 kilometers through Argentina and Chile, ending in Argentina's Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world. "Ramona," her trusty touring bike, accompanied her to Paonia, but her interest in a mountain bike is growing daily. Here at HCN, Sarah hopes to grow as a writer by learning what makes the West the place it is.

Wyatt Orme has spent a lot of time in wild places. Born in Spokane, Washington, he attended Middlebury College in Vermont and studied world literature. After graduating, Wyatt wandered around the Middle East, making his way to Tataouine, Tunisia, the city that helped inspire George Lucas's Star Wars. Most exciting, however, was driving across the northern tip of the Sahara, through endless sand and sky. "I felt like it was the kind of place that could kill me," Wyatt says.

That same thought crossed his mind while hauling salmon out of Alaska's Cook Inlet during a stint as a commercial fisherman last summer. And again during a paddling expedition across the North Slope, which he later wrote about for Middlebury Magazine.

An interest in journalism led Wyatt to Washington, D.C., for a job with NPR. After a year in "small, contained places," he's excited to return to the West. He chose HCN for the opportunity to write about the issues and landscapes he loves – and to be back in a place where backpacking is not considered an extreme sport. We hope he won't also think of the office as a place that could kill him.

Summer VisitorsTwo weeks into a summer road trip from their Austin, Texas home to the northern Minnesota's Boundary Waters, Brad and Colleen Belk walked into HCN and subscribed. The couple had just visited Brad's cousin, historian and HCN contributor Andy Gulliford, in Durango, Colorado. They're excited to see so much water in Colorado – Brad worked 32 years for the Lower Colorado River Authority in Texas, where reservoirs are at a precarious 39 percent – and they brought their canoe to enjoy it.